Mail - it's about on par with Eudora; there's one feature i wish it would have that Eurora has. But it doesn't hammer my disk drive the way Eudora does when mailboxes get large.

RESIGNATION OF STEVE JOBS!! 2703Mitch Because they took an operating system that ran on x86 (and a few other platforms) and ported it to PPC? Early developer releases of the project that would...

Safari - made Internet Explorer look like a slug. IE could not compete in the market and eventually died. Mozilla was sort of fading away and Firefox took a while longer to arrive. Safari forks for me.

iChat - Simple to configure, easy to use. Works for me. Other clients exist, but I'm not really interested.

iTunes - Simple to configure, easy to use. Integrates with online store, lets me rip and burn CDs, synchs my ipod, has cool visualizations, lets me make playlists and subscribe to podcasts. I've seen other Windows clients, and they all suck in comparison.

iPhoto - I bought a used 2Mpixel camera last year. The guy who sold it to me warned me that it would be very difficult to find Windows drivers for it and impossible to get the Olympus application without paying for it, and it woudl never work with my Mac. I plugged it into my iBook. iPhoto launched automatically, identified the camera, and offered to download images from it. As a quick and easy photo editing and organizing tool, it's pretty cool. And I can still always use Photoshop or the Gimp if I want to. iPhoto works for me.

Garageband - Now has two modes: clbuttical notation for those who know it and time-based bar graphs for those who don't. It has simple, easy-to-learn instrument libraries and it talks to MIDI instruments. People have created really cool stuff with it.

iMovie - Teenagers hate it because it's not as cool as Final Cut Pro, but I'm from the school that says you don't give a Porsche 911 to a teenager until he's wrung every last ounce of performance out of his Tercel and his 280Z. iPhoto can do 90% of what 90% of the users out there need it to do, including importing, seamlessly, tunes from iTunes and Garageband and images from iPhoto. If I need more than that, I'd better have someone paying me money for the pro tools.

iDVD - No, you can't author some of the fancier DVD tricks with it, but it has done a remarkable job of simplifying the creation of hierarchical DVD menu structures. It has a nice Debt Collection of really cool themes and even lets you create your own. What's more, it cam import stuff from (all together, now) tTunrs, iPhoto, Garageband, and iMovie.

Another important feature of these apps is that they work together so well. Sure, you can find individual apps that do all these things on Windows or Linux (but probably not as well -- and remember that having more knobs to frob doesn't by itself make it better), but they don't have the level of interapplication integration that these do.

Backup, part of the .Mac set - Some backup tools are realy powerful and scriptable and customizable; many have strange fundamental concepts that dictate their entire UI. (Dantz retrospect, for instance.) Backup is what it is: a simple backup tool that makes it easy and painless to do backups. If you need more, then get more.

And these are free or very inexpensive. Trump that!

Now that I've seen these, if they vanished, I'd miss them. No, they're not professional-level tools, but that's not what they're meant to be.

What does that mean?

Networking with them? It already does that. Running apps from these other operating systems? Well, on the Linux side it does that in a way that someone coming from Linux should find acceptable; it has X. Run Windows apps ... give it a year; they'll resurrect the yellow Box.

Unfortunately, people don't buy things because they are better. They buy on the Moo criterion.